Tuesday, 30 December 2014

The Violations Documentation Center in Syria has now documented 24,168 civilians killed since the 29 August 2013 UK Parliament vote rejecting military intervention in Syria.

That vote was on a Government motion which raised the possibility of military action in response to a massive chemical weapons attack on civilians by the Assad regime; however the motion was clear that military action could only take place after a UN Security Council debate, and after a further vote in the House of Commons.

224 Members of Parliament of the opposition Labour Party, under the leadership of Ed Miliband, as well as 39 backbench coalition MPs and 22 other MPs, voted against the motion.

The figure of 24,168 civilians killed since is from the Violations Documentation Center online database, and may have been updated by the time you read this. The VDC are just one of the organisations collecting and verifying reports of deaths in Syria. They are not able to document every death.

The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has issued a series of reports on violent deaths in the Syria conflict by comparing information from a number of organisations on the ground, including the VDC. The most recent UN report covers the period from the start of protests in March 2011 up to the end of April 2014. It gave a minimum number of 191,369 confirmed violent deaths. According to the report, that number is “likely undercounting the true total number of conflict-related killings that have occurred during this time period.” For that same time period, the VDC was only able to document 109,531 confirmed violent deaths including regime deaths, just over half of the UN number. Therefore the VDC number is a significant undercount compared to the UN number, which itself is a minimum count and therefore an undercount by an unknown margin.

If the VDC undercount of civilian deaths for the period since the UK Parliament vote is of the same proportion as the undercount of all violent deaths for the period covered by the UN report, then the number of civilian deaths since the House of Commons vote is over 42,000.

For the entire conflict, the VDC has documented 78,819 civilians killed to date, greater than the recorded number of British civilians killed in the Second World War. By the same calculation of comparing to the UN count, the true figure of civilians violently killed in Syria since March 2011 is likely to be over 137,000. All violent deaths, civilian and military, are now well over 200,000.

None of these figures include war-related deaths caused by exposure, malnutrition, and destruction of medical services; more fallen sparrows than we can count.

Below are the 95 civilians that the Violations Documentation Center listed as killed in one day, Christmas Day, 2014.